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Facebook Fan Page Upgrade – Latest Changes

By
Des O'Mahony
| On
Fri, March 25, 2011

Bookassist’s Paul Ferry outlines the latest changes to your hotel’s Facebook Fan Page after recent Facebook upgrades, and shows how you can take advantage of them.

Since March 10th, 2011 Facebook has globally upgraded how you can use your Fan Page. In this article we detail some of the changes that are important to your hotel and also other changes to note.

Use Facebook as The Hotel

The biggest change in the recent Facebook upgrade is that you can now interact with fans as your hotel’s Fan Page rather than as your personal login. To do this simply go to “Account” in the top right-hand corner of your screen, click on “Use Facebook as Page” and select the relevant Page in the pop up.

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The advantages of using Facebook as a Page are that you can interact with the hotel’s fans and leave comments on other pages as the “hotel” rather than as yourself. Other features include the ability to respond to fan reviews as the “hotel” and also the ability to tag the hotel itself in photos, events and videos.

Notifications

Another great feature is that you can get notifications sent to you when a fan interacts with your hotel’s fan page. You can edit notification settings by going to “Edit Page” and selecting notifications from the left hand menu.

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These recent changes to Facebook Pages represent a step in the right direction to help optimise your ability to interact with your fans.

Fan Page Display Changes

The old Fan Page layout displayed tabs along the top but these have now migrated to the left hand column under the profile picture, see image below.

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The effect of this change is yet to be seen as quite a lot of hotels had set up customised tabs which have now taken a less prominent postion on the page, so conversion on these customised pages may be affected. Yet another new feature is that your recent images are displayed just above the wall similar to a personal profile page, see image below. This gives the page a much more inviting feel. You can alter the images by hovering over them and using the checkbox to delete, and another image will be selected from your existing photo albums. (You can also turn off the image strip completely in wall settings.)

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Exit Static FBML Pages - enter iFrames

For developers and app users perhaps the most significant change to note since the 10th March upgrade is that Facebook no longer supports the ability to create Static FBML Pages (customised pages) which many service providers had built for enhancing Facebook Pages. Instead it has placed emphasis on embedding external web pages into Facebook using iFrames. This new approach is very flexible and is another move to make Facebook the one-stop shop for all interaction with your customers. Watch this space for some exciting Bookassist announcements relating to Facebook services shortly!

If you have any comments on this blog entry please leave a comment below.

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Paul Ferry is Senior Social Media Strategist at Bookassist (bookassist.org), the technology and online strategy partner for hotels.